If Santa and his elves are the light that brings us goodwill and joy, then scalpers are the darkness that snatches away all happiness – and I once again hope that the coming year will be the year they stop destroying the Internet.
I'm sure you've all had bad experiences with scalpers – people who use an army of bots or sheer desire (and maybe other tricks) to buy up something that's in high demand but in short supply, only to resell it at a huge markup.
The latter has been my biggest source of frustration with scalping in 2025. Magic: GatheringSecret lairs or FaultWith widespread availability (even the ability to attend competitive events), scalpers have taken advantage of the limited supply to drive up prices and ruin the fun for everyone. And although I'm not in Pokemon TCG scene, I know that scalping is a curse for ordinary players too.
Luckily, we have a few tricks up our sleeves in the fight against scalpers and resellers. I walked around our office to ask the TechRadar team what methods they'd seen to combat scalpers, and these three turned out to be our favorites.
The first one is actually the rule introduced by the UK government This helps control concert ticket prices and prevents tickets from being resold for more than the original cost.
Service fees will be taken into account, and the rules will also place limits on them to hopefully prevent the price cap from being undermined, but essentially this proposed legislation will prevent resellers from making a profit. This will hurt scalpers, but not legitimate fans, reselling their concert tickets because they can no longer attend, and will help fans who missed out the first time to go and enjoy the artist without having to pay a premium.
While this approach is not ideal for all scenarios, for live events this approach seems to be the gold standard. It punishes scalpers without negatively impacting true fans.
Another option for hosting live events or selling a product with limited availability is a draw. I think they work especially well if launched in conjunction with an official fan group, such as subscribers to a service or newsletter.
While this randomized queue does require some sort of bot detection, as well as purchase restrictions to prevent bad actors from finding ways to abuse the system, it helps give fans a fair chance to get a limited supply and prevents the annoyance that comes with entering a digital queue only to find out that the item you wanted was sold out while you were still 10,000 spots away from the start – just like with the ballot, you know in advance that you can get something.
The last method I will highlight is “build on demand”: a system every time Magic the player wishes Wizards of the Coast to return to Secret Lair.
Instead of making all the limited edition pre-order items in advance, the retailer instead sets a time limit of days, weeks, months, whatever they want, in which people can place a pre-order. The product will then be manufactured per pre-order and subsequently shipped to customers.
Sure, it may be slow to get everyone what they ordered, but it will ensure that everyone gets the limited edition item – so you won't be left with people annoyed that they missed out on it. Limited Edition PS5 Controller or TCG cards because they didn't join the online queue at exactly 5:00 pm (hurts every time).
Is the end in sight?
Unfortunately, these solutions are not foolproof – they cannot account for all types of scalping – but I wish that by 2026 more retailers would use these and other methods they can come up with to combat the scalping epidemic.
Having something you're glad has been snatched up by malicious middlemen and bots just so they can sell it back to you at a markup makes almost no one happy – only opportunistic bad actors who revel in ruining someone's day.
I saw many players in my local Riftbound group upset that they couldn't get tickets to the Bologna Regional Qualifier, one of the game's first major regional events outside of Asia.
Representatives of faults have since promised to improve sales in the future and stated that you cannot resell tickets to the event. If the name on the order does not match the name of the person who will receive the tournament pins that day, you will not receive them.
Quitting scalping won't fix everything in the world, but it will brighten the days of anyone who has ever had the displeasure of dealing with it. I expect that over the next 12 months we will continue to need all the brightness we can get.
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